Altered State. Don Pendleton

Farm?”

      “It crossed my mind,” Bolan admitted.

      Brognola nodded, his shoulders slumping just a bit.

      “I may be getting paranoid,” he said. “But you know what they say, right?”

      “Just because you’re paranoid—” Bolan began the old slogan.

      “It doesn’t mean nobody’s out to get you.”

      “Right.”

      “So, this is delicate ,” Brognola said. “I thought a little extra buffer couldn’t hurt. Hey, if I’m wrong, we’re only out a couple hours and sixty bucks.”

      “Okay.”

      Brognola scrutinized the other passengers, as far as possible, then said, “Let’s head back toward the stern.”

      They made the shift, and no one followed them.

      “Okay,” he said at last. “What do you know about a group called Vanguard International?”

      “They do private security worldwide,” Bolan replied, “on top of various government contracts. They guard oilfields, corporate offices—anything, anywhere, from what I understand.”

      “Assuming that the customer can pay their going rates,” Brognola said.

      “I didn’t think it was a charity.”

      “I guess you’ve heard about the controversy in Iraq?”

      “Only what CNN reported,” Bolan said.

      He was aware that three Vanguard employees had been kidnapped and executed on camera by Iraqi terrorists in 2005. A few weeks later, Vanguard commandos had raided an Iraqi village said to be hometown of the kidnap team’s ringleader, gunning down three dozen unarmed men, women and children. An FBI investigation found that the victims were slain “without cause,” but Iraqi officials and State Department spokesmen mutually ruled out any criminal charges.

      Some people wondered why.

      “Well, what they ran was the tip of the iceberg,” Brognola said. “We’ve got allegations of Third World gun-running, and half of the UN is up in arms over supposed violations of the Mercenary Convention.”

      “Makes sense,” Bolan said.

      He couldn’t quote chapter and verse from the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, approved by the UN’s General Assembly in 1989, but he understood the gist of it. The declaration defined mercs as private soldiers recruited expressly for profit and condemned their employment either in general warfare or for specific projects, such as toppling governments. Companies like Vanguard and its handful of competitors skirted the rules by posing as “security consultants,” or simply ignored the UN’s declaration in full knowledge that it was a toothless order, virtually unenforceable.

      How could the UN stop America, Britain, or any other country from hiring private troops to guard facilities abroad? And if those “guards” should run amok, committing acts that qualified as war crimes if performed by soldiers of a sovereign state, what was the legal remedy?

      In Vanguard’s case, apparently, there wasn’t one.

      “We wouldn’t normally concern ourselves with anything like this,” Brognola said. “Hell, Stony Man was founded to reach out and touch the bad guys when the law can’t do it. And the gun-running, that falls to State or Treasury, if either one of them decides it’s worth their time.”

      “So, what, then?” Bolan asked his oldest living friend.

      “So, heroin,” Brognola said.

      “Explain.”

      “You know we keep track of the traffic, right?”

      Bolan nodded, waiting for the rest.

      “Well, what you may not know is that Afghanistan surpassed Turkey in heroin production during the nineties. In 1999, the Afghanis had 350 square miles of opium poppies under cultivation, with smack refineries running around the clock. A year later, the Taliban moves in and takes control of the country, declaring the drug trade ‘un-Islamic.’ Whatever else we think of them, hiding Osama, treating their women like slaves and the rest, they reduced Afghan poppy cultivation by ninety-odd percent in one year, down to thirty square miles in 2001.”

      “What’s the bad news?” Bolan asked.

      “That would be 9/11,” Brognola replied. “Down come the towers in New York, and we invade Afghanistan. Boot out the Taliban and supervise elections. Never mind missing Bin Laden. Anyone can have a bad day, right? Or eight bad years? The trouble is, that with the Taliban deposed, the drug trade started up again, big-time.”

      “So I heard. But, what’s the most recent data?”

      “Right now, opium cultivation is back up to three hundred square miles and climbing. The UN’s International Narcotics Control Board says Afghanistan produced 3,500 tons of heroin last year, up from 185 tons in 2001. That’s an increase of nearly two thousand percent. Scotland Yard says nearly all the heroin in Britain comes from Afghanistan now. They’ve frozen out the China white and Turkish product, underselling their competitors because they deal in bulk. It isn’t quite that bad, stateside, but I can promise you, we’re getting there.”

      “I’ll take your word for it,” Bolan said. “But where does Vanguard come into the picture?”

      “It’s looking more and more like they may be the picture,” Brognola replied. “Or, anyway, the transport side of it.”

      “I’m listening.”

      “They aren’t just in Iraq, okay? That little blow-up got the company its first global publicity, but they’ve got outposts everywhere you go. Saudi Arabia. Bangkok. Jakarta. Take your pick.”

      “Afghanistan,” Bolan said.

      “Almost from the start, back in 2001,” Brognola said. “They weren’t front-line, but they moved in behind the coalition troops, guarding oil pipelines, corporate HQs and CEOs, the usual. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we think they hooked up with the poppy growers and refiners.”

      “When you say we think , that means…?”

      “We know,” Brognola said. “We have surveillance tapes of Vanguard personnel guarding the opium plantations, running convoys on drug shipments, piloting some of the planes.”

      “So, lock them up and shut it down,” Bolan replied.

      “Ah, that’s the rub,” Brognola said. “So far, nobody’s caught them with a shipment anywhere in U.S. jurisdiction, or in Britain. They’ve been able to evade surveillance for the hand-offs, and they let the buyers run with it from there—wherever there is, for a given load.”

      “We must have pull inside Afghanistan,” Bolan said. “With the Army, FBI and CIA in place? A president we basically appointed to replace the Taliban? You’re telling me nobody can arrest drug dealers operating in plain sight?”

      “It’s all about ‘democracy,’ these days. Democracy and appearances , okay? Afghanistan was on the economic ropes when we moved in, back in 2001. The government, such as it was, was drowning in red ink and weird religious proclamations from the Taliban. Now they’re on track again—or seem to be—but tossing out the zealots left a vacuum. And who fills it? The same characters who were in charge before the Taliban started its holy war. Oil men and heroin producers. The DEA calls it a ‘heroin economy.’ I won’t say that drug smugglers own the president, but draw your own conclusions.”

      “So the job is what, exactly?” Bolan asked.

      “We can’t wipe out the poppy farms or the refineries,” Brognola answered. “No one can, unless the Afghans managed to elect a government that’s more concerned with law and common decency than profit.”

      Bolan